Photo Credit: Jimmy Sime
6th May 2026
I am asked a lot to explain what social class is which is completely understandable, given that I was the person to found the Working Class Climate Alliance back in 2023. I have written this article to clarify how I approach it and understand it to be, and why discussions about class are vital to progressive environmental action. Arguably this piece is long-overdue, but better late than never I suppose! [1]
I have tried to generalise without overgeneralising, but it is worth noting that how class is experienced in daily life, and the language used to describe class structures, varies across societies and historical contexts.
Social class describes a person’s position within an economic system built around who owns wealth, how it is generated, and who benefits. At its core your social class is determined by how close you are to owning the assets that generate wealth, and the stability and power that this proximity affords: a business owner, for example, profits from the labour of those that they employ, and a worker receives wages in exchange for their labour. Understood in the sense of economic relations then, everyone who sells their labour for wages is working class.
Many people stop here and assert that class is exclusively determined through these material factors. However stopping here leads to oversimplified perspectives, because it creates universalist assumptions about what it means to be human and how oppression is experienced in daily life. In turn, this obscures the ways that inequality is experienced amongst the general population. In order to truly understand class in the twenty-first century, we also need to look at its social and cultural dimensions.
These dimensions are not separate from economic relations but grow out of them. Our position within the economic system shapes how we understand ourselves and the world around us – where we feel we belong, what kinds of behaviour feel natural or out of place, and what possibilities we see for ourselves in life. These attitudes, behaviours and values are picked up over time (and eventually become second nature) through interactions with our friends, families and social networks, as well as through our exposure to cultural products such as TV shows and social media.
Unfortunately, not all ways of being are treated as equal. Class relations act as a social filter through which people position themselves and others in order to establish status and worth, as well as judge who does and does not belong in particular spaces. Certain groups are marked as valuable, whilst others are marked as lacking. This filtering privileges those whose ways of being align with dominant norms, with those who benefit the most being overwhelmingly middle class and above, because their mannerisms are already shaped by, and reflective of these norms.
Because class is both an economic and relational phenomenon that shapes how we behave and how we come to understand ourselves and those around us, it is common for people who achieve upward or downward social mobility to feel ‘in between’ social classes – never feeling fully working or middle class. They may have more or less money than they did before, but they feel unable to meet the behavioural expectations of their new class position, because the social and cultural norms they absorbed growing up did not vanish into thin air when their economic circumstances changed.
In terms of how someone earns an income, there is often no difference between the working and middle class – both have to sell their labour for wages in order to survive. What distinguishes the groups then, are the holistic dimensions of how life is lived. This is something that David Graeber highlighted in his article Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional Managerial Class:
“Middle classness is not really an economic category at all; it was always more social and political. What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one, whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions, ultimately exist for your benefit.”
Class is Intersectional
How we experience our class position is also shaped by other factors such as race, age, gender, and where we live. Depending on what these factors are, they can be a source of power or disadvantage. bell hooks drew focus to this throughout Where We Stand: Class Matters, a short book reflecting on her experiences with social mobility as a black working class woman in the United States (US).
Writing about the feminist movement in the late twentieth century, hooks observed that as white middle class women gained greater access to economic power through the workplace, discussions about class in feminist circles began to fizzle out. Women were encouraged to see these economic gains as beneficial to everyone, rather than acknowledging the continued subjugation of black and working class women, whose exploitation was necessary for the economic gains of others: in order for some women to be able to leave the home and go to work, others had to remain in the home and undertake necessary tasks such as cooking, cleaning and care giving.
This resulted in working-class women across the US occupying domestic worker roles. Although this affected both white and black working class women, the latter faced an even more constrained set of possibilities owing to racist legislation which, until the 1970s, officially excluded black women from better paying jobs. They were also denied the welfare provisions that allowed poor white working-class women to stay at home and care for their children.
For the more privileged feminists during this time, confronting class would have forced them to critically examine their own internalised classism and racism, and the unjust nature of how their relative liberation came to exist in the first place. They would have also had to acknowledge that that genuine feminist struggle would require an even redistribution of resources rather than celebrating some women’s access to work whilst others bore the cost:
“The freedom of privileged class women of all races required the sustained subordination of working-class women… There was simply no way for women with class privilege who wanted to garner economic power and status while simultaneously holding on to their feminist credentials to confront the issue of class.”
Quote from: bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
hooks identified a structural problem, whereby the exclusion of working-class women was the predictable outcome of a society underpinned by class structures designed to subjugate the working classes, just as the disproportionate exclusion of black working-class women was the predictable outcome of a society that is also underpinned by white supremacy. The failure of broad sections of the feminist movement to acknowledge – let alone address this, meant that these structures were left unchallenged and were subsequently reinforced over time.
Environmentalism in the Present Day
The issues addressed by hooks bear a striking resemblance to those faced by working-class people in environmental circles today. Just as working-class women fought to have their voices heard in feminist circles – acts that were often met with condemnation, so too do working-class people find their voices ignored and delegitimised by individuals, groups and institutions involved in climate action.
Alongside being routinely excluded from decision-making processes and stereotyped as ignorant about climate change, working-class people often find their calls to address this unfair treatment downplayed or ignored entirely. The reasons for this are multifaceted – from personal experience, the two most frequent drivers of this are the misbelief that doing so would be divisive, and the unwillingness of more privileged individuals to confront the fact that their class privilege has effectively been unearned at the cost of others.
Having these discussions is important because they help us to understand many of the root causes of class-based societal tensions that we face today. They tell us not just how, but why inequalities are created and maintained through everyday relations – why people are read and judged as they are, why belonging is established in some spaces and denied in others, and why power is unequally distributed and reproduced amongst ourselves[2]. And when we identify the root causes of problems, we are able to locate solutions that are capable of fixing them.
How we understand class shapes who gets listened to and what solutions are put on the table. Taking class seriously means critically examining who holds power within groups, movements and institutions, as well as whose knowledge and experience is treated as legitimate. These are, at times, difficult conversations – but if we are seeking to dismantle oppressive ideologies, structures and institutions (which I imagine 99% of people reading this article are), then we have got to be prepared to be uncomfortable at certain stages of the process. Understanding how class relations operate in all areas of life is the basis on which an effective environmental movement becomes possible. Discomfort is an inevitable part of that process.
[1] The question of how someone might define their own class position is an extensive enough topic in itself to warrant its own article, which I will get round to in the near future.
[2] In a more positive light, there is also much to learn from groups and movements that have managed to build solidarity across class differences.
Written by Emma River-Roberts